Excerpt from The Barbary Coast
by Herbert Asbury
Although Pacific Street was never actually toppled from its proud
position as the heart of the Barbary Coast, there was a long period before the earthquake
and fire of 1906 when its supremacy was seriously threatened by Kearny Street,
which runs from Market Street, northward past Telegraph Hill to the waterfront.
The fact that Kearny Street provided a direct route from the northern part of
the city to the business and financial districts prevented it from superseding
Pacific Street as the most sinful thoroughfare in San Francisco, for it
increased rapidly in commercial importance, while Pacific Street, so far as
legitimate business was concerned, declined steadily from the early days of the
gold rush. Nevertheless, for some 30 years Kearny
Street boasted many dives which were fully as low
and disreputable as those for which Pacific
Street was so deservedly notorious. During the
middle eighteen-eighties, about a decade after the murder of Bull Run Allen and
the elimination of the dashing figure of Happy Jack Harrington as a factor in
underworld activities, the center of sin in San Francisco was the diagonally
cut block bounded by Broadway, Kearny and Montgomery Streets - a comparatively
small area, but so reeking with depravity that it was known both to the police
and to its habitués as the Devil's Acre. In its issue of February 28,
1886 the San Francisco Call described it as "the resort and abiding
place of the worst criminals in town," and complained that respectable
citizens could not traverse Kearny Street on their way to and from business
without witnessing "the utter shamelessness of the denizens."
Perhaps the most disreputable resorts in the Devil's Acre were the dozen
or more bagnios, deadfalls, and cheap dancehalls on the eastern side of Kearny
Street - a line of dens which was appropriately
called Battle
Row. Much of the Call's indignation arose from the fact that none of the
windows in the brothels were equipped with shades or curtains, so that whatever
went on inside was visible to whoever passed in the street. Otherwise there was
nothing spectacular about these dives; they catered to the lowest of the Barbary
Coast hangers-on and were chiefly remarkable for their sordidness
and viciousness. Scarcely a day ever passed in which each of them was not the
scene of at least one robbery and half dozen brawls, many of which ended
fatally. For many years Battle
Row is said to have averaged a murder a week. Equally notorious was an
underground saloon at the southern end of the row.
Originally this dive was known as the Slaughterhouse, but later it was
ceremoniously rechristened on a night in the latter part of 1885 when the
proprietor served free drinks to all comers and at the conclusion of the
festivities smashed a bottle of beer against an inebriated customer's head and
announced that thenceforth his place would be called the Morgue. It was the
particular rendezvous of the pimps and of the lush-workers who thronged the
Devil's Acre; that is, thieves who specialized
in robbing drunken men, having first, if necessary, knocked them unconscious
with a slug or section of lead pipe. The Morgue was also headquarters for the
many drug addicts, better known in those days as hoppies, who lived in the
alleys of Chinatown and the Barbary Coast.
They eked out a bare existence by panhandling, by running errands for the
brothel-keepers and inmates and by collecting wood and old boxes, which they
sold to Chinese merchants and householders. Occasionally they earned a few
pennies by showing the needle marks in their arms to tourists.
Few of the hoppies could afford a hypodermic needle; instead, they used
an ordinary medicine dropper, filling it with cocaine or morphine and forcing
the point into their flesh. They obtained most of their supplies of narcotics
at an all-night drug store in Grant
Avenue where enough cocaine or morphine for an
injection cost from 10¢ to 15¢. (Copyright
1933)
NOTE: And you thought things were
depraved in certain parts of the country these days.